Meaning, Montoya, and PostStructuralism in Business Writing

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” ~ Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

Inigo Montoya

It’s been a while since the last post, so I thought sharing a bit of my current research project/obsession would be a good way to convey writing productivity simply through creation of another page on this blog. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

The nerd in me would like to highlight that this creates a rhetorical situation of authoring content with two potential outcomes–1) sharing what I think is an interesting element of professional writing, or 2) crafting an illusion of blogging productivity by re-purposing content originally (and 15-minutes-ago-recently) written to help sketch out a research interest.

Either way, here it goes.

Business and technical writing requires that the author and the reader are closely aligned in linguistic interpretation and intended/conveyed meaning.

Understanding Derridean linguistic and poststructuralist theories allows the professional writer to use language and narrative structure to strategically position a product or company in the marketplace. It also reinforces the need for consistency in internally adopted and externally promoted language to reduce interpretive misses.

Because it relies on the reader and changes due to the arbitrary nature of signs, Derrida presents meaning as decentralized and unstable; this status of discourse, and specifically language, produces a continuous (inter)play of signification.

The instability of meaning based on signs and symbols alone forces consideration of narrative structure as a method of making meaning out of this linguistic interplay. Derrida goes on to show how structure, too, can be deconstructed and destabilized based on author or audience presence, metaphysics, proximity, repetition, and disruption.

Derrida discusses Lévi-Strauss’ position that only nature can be universal, and dependence on social structure is indicative of cultural influence. He concludes that the interpretive process is a posthuman act of creating truth, performed in absence of a collective origin of meaning or affirmation of signs and their signification.

* Derrida, J. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 278-294.
** Image Source: Unencyclopedia.